Bruckner Symphonies Nos. 4-9 – Klemperer

There is a moment in the slow movement of Symphony No. 5, somewhere past the fourteen-minute mark, where the strings of the Philharmonia simply refuse to hurry. You understand, all at once, why Klemperer’s Bruckner has outlasted several generations of fashionable alternatives. The adagio unfolds like something being poured rather than played. No rubato to speak of. No wallowing, either. Just the steady, almost geological accumulation of sound that made this conductor, in his last decades, into something like a monument even before he died.

EMI’s decision to gather these six symphonies into a single box does the conductor a favor he might not have expected. Heard individually, over the years, each release carried its own small controversy: too slow here, too foursquare there. Heard together, the cycle reveals a consistency of temperament that is almost eerie. This is not interpretation as narrative, the way Furtwängler made of the Ninth a kind of theological crisis. It is not architecture-as-drama in Jochum’s sense, all those terraced dynamics and rhetorical hesitations before a big cadence. Klemperer builds his Bruckner the way a mason builds a wall, one course at a time, mortar allowed to set before the next stone goes on.

Skeptics will point, as they always have, to the tempi. The old joke about Klemperer’s andantes needing calendars rather than stopwatches gets trotted out reflexively, and it is not entirely fair. Compare his studio Fourth from 1963, Kingsway Hall, that boomy, glorious barn of a room, against the later Munich broadcast with the Bavarian Radio orchestra, and it’s the studio account that actually moves faster in places, if not in feeling. What Klemperer withholds is not pace but incident. He will not point up a phrase for you. He trusts the material, sometimes to a fault, and there are stretches in the Sixth — a symphony that under Jochum’s baton practically dances — where the results feel foursquare in a way even sympathetic ears will register as monotony.

But then there’s the Eighth.

Eighty-four minutes, the Haas-Klemperer hybrid edition, recorded in 1970 at the tail end of his EMI relationship with the New Philharmonia, by then reconstituted after the players’ brief mutiny against Legge, though you’d never guess anything had happened to the sound of the institution. This interpretation has weight without ever feeling logy. The finale’s great coda, that massive unspooling where all four movements’ themes stack atop one another like geological strata suddenly thrust upward, arrives with an inevitability that younger, more polished Brucknerians rarely achieve. Karajan’s late Vienna account has more sheen. Wand’s Cologne cycle has more transparency in the inner voices. Klemperer has gravity, actual physical gravity, the sense of enormous mass being moved slowly and deliberately across a vast floor.

The engineering holds up remarkably well for its age. Walter Legge’s old team — Andry, Jelinek, Suvi Raj Grubb working the later sessions — captured a startlingly full brass sound, particularly in the Seventh, where the Wagner tubas in the adagio’s great climax, written, as every program note reminds us, in mourning for Wagner himself, sit warmly within the string texture rather than blaring over it. Nearly half a century on, there’s tape hiss if you listen for it, a touch of edge on massed violins above the staff. Nothing that should give a serious collector pause.

Klemperer’s own relationship to this music ran deeper than most of his contemporaries’. He’d been championing Bruckner since the 1920s, when doing so was itself something of a statement. The symphonies were still tangled up with nationalist baggage that would grow far uglier within a decade, and it took some nerve for a Jewish conductor to stake part of his early reputation on this repertoire. He said, late in life, with the particular dry candor that made him such an unnerving interview subject, that he considered Bruckner the greater composer but conducted Mahler more often. Mahler had, after all, given him his first job, and there was a loyalty in that which outweighed pure aesthetic preference. It’s a very Klemperer thing to admit. No sentimentality. Just the facts, arranged in order of what mattered.

Does the cycle displace Wand, or the classic Jochum Dresden set, at the top of anyone’s list? Probably not, and I wouldn’t insist otherwise. But it belongs somewhere close to the top of the second tier, and in the Fifth and Eighth it rises higher than that: performances of such unhurried conviction that they make most modern recordings sound faintly nervous by comparison, always glancing over their shoulder at the metronome. Klemperer never glanced anywhere. He simply proceeded, and trusted you’d follow.